Volume II Part 18 (2/2)
Lincoln, whose fame had made rapid strides in the West since his debate with Douglas in 1858, had been anxious to visit New York. It was the home of Seward, the centre of Republican strength, and to him practically an unknown land. Through the invitation of the Young Men's Central Republican Union he was now to lecture at Cooper Inst.i.tute on the 27th of February. It was arranged at first that he speak in Henry Ward Beecher's church, but the change, relieving him from too close a.s.sociation with the great apostle of abolition, opened a wider door for his reception. Personally he was known to very few people in the city or State. In 1848, on his way to New England to take the stump, he had called upon Thurlow Weed at Albany, and together they visited Millard Fillmore, then candidate for Vice President; but the meeting made such a slight impression upon the editor of the _Evening Journal_ that he had entirely forgotten it. Thirty years before, in one of his journeys to Illinois, William Cullen Bryant had met him. Lincoln was then a tall, awkward lad, the captain of a militia company in the Black Hawk War, whose racy and original conversation attracted the young poet; but Bryant, too, had forgotten him, and it was long after the famous debate that he identified his prairie acquaintance as the opponent of Douglas. Lincoln, however, did not come as a stranger. His encounter with the great Illinoisan had marked him as a powerful and logical reasoner whose speeches embraced every political issue of the day and cleared up every doubtful point. Well-informed people everywhere knew of him. He was not yet a national character, but he had a national reputation.
Though Lincoln's lecture was one of a course, the admission fee did not restrain an eager audience from filling the commodious hall.
”Since the day of Clay and Webster,” said the _Tribune_, ”no man has spoken to a larger a.s.semblage of the intellect and mental culture of our city.”[510] Bryant acted as chairman of the meeting, and other well-known men of the city occupied the stage. In his _Life of Lincoln_, Herndon suggests that the new suit of clothes which seemed so fine in his Springfield home was in such awkward contrast with the neatly fitting dress of the New Yorkers that it disconcerted him, and the brilliant audience dazzled and embarra.s.sed him; but his hearers thought only of the pregnant matter of the discourse, so calmly and logically discussed that Horace Greeley, years afterward, p.r.o.nounced it ”the very best political address to which I ever listened, and I have heard some of Webster's grandest.”[511]
[Footnote 510: New York _Tribune_, February 28, 1860.]
[Footnote 511: _Century Magazine_, July, 1891, p. 373. An address of Greeley written in 1868.]
Lincoln had carefully prepared for the occasion. He came East to show what manner of man he was, and while he evidenced deep moral feeling which kept his audience in a glow, he combined with it rare political sagacity, notably in omitting the ”house divided against itself”
declaration. He argued that the Republican party was not revolutionary, but conservative, since it maintained the doctrine of the fathers who held and acted upon the opinion that Congress had the power to prohibit slavery in the territories. ”Some of you,” he said, addressing himself to the Southern people, ”are for reviving the foreign slave trade; some for Congress forbidding the territories to prohibit slavery within their limits; some for maintaining slavery in the territories through the judiciary; some for the 'great principle'
that if one man would enslave another, no third man should object, fantastically called popular sovereignty; but never a man among you is in favour of federal prohibition of slavery in federal territories, according to the practice of our fathers who formed the government under which we live. You say we have made the slavery question more prominent than it formerly was. We deny it. We admit that it is more prominent, but we deny that we made it so. It was not we, but you who discarded the old policy of the fathers.” Of Southern threats of disunion, he said: ”Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the government unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Const.i.tution as you please on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.” Referring to the Harper's Ferry episode, he said: ”That affair in its philosophy corresponds with the many attempts related in history at the a.s.sa.s.sination of kings and emperors. An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people, until he fancies himself commissioned by heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt which ends in little else than his own execution.”
Lincoln's lecture did not disappoint. He had entertained and interested the vast a.s.semblage, which frequently rang with cheers and shouts of applause as the gestures and the mirth-provoking look emphasised the racy hits that punctuated the address. ”No man,” said the _Tribune_, ”ever before made such an impression on his first appeal to a New York audience. He is one of Nature's orators.”[512]
[Footnote 512: New York _Tribune_, March 1, 1860.]
Two days later, Seward addressed the United States Senate. There is no evidence that he fixed this date because of the Cooper Inst.i.tute lecture. The gravity of the political situation demanded some expression from him; but the knowledge of the time of Lincoln's speech gave him ample opportunity to arrange to follow it with one of his own, if he wished to have the last word, or to inst.i.tute a comparison of their respective views on the eve of the national convention.
However this may be, Seward regarded his utterances on this occasion of the utmost importance. He was the special object of Southern vituperation. A ”Fire-Eater” of the South publicly advertised that he would be one of one hundred ”gentlemen” to give twenty-five dollars each for the heads of Horace Greeley, Henry Ward Beecher, and forty other prominent Northern leaders in and out of Congress, but for the head of Seward his proposed subscription was multiplied twenty fold.
It is noticeable that in this long list of ”traitors” the name of Abraham Lincoln does not appear. It was Seward whom the South expected the Republican party would nominate for President, and in him it saw the narrow-minded, selfish, obstinate Abolitionist who hated them as intensely as they despised him. To dispossess the Southern mind of this feeling the Auburn statesman now endeavoured to show that if elected President he would not treat the South unfriendly.
Seward's speech bears evidence of careful preparation. It was not only read to friends for criticism, but Henry B. Stanton, in his _Random Recollections_, says that Seward, before the day of its delivery, a.s.sisted him in describing such a scene in the Senate as he desired laid before the public. On his return to Was.h.i.+ngton, Seward had not been received with a show of friends.h.i.+p by his a.s.sociates from the South. It was remarked that while Republican senators greeted him warmly, ”his Southern friends were afraid to be seen talking to him.”
On the occasion of his speech, however, he wished the record to show every senator in his place and deeply interested.
Visitors to the Senate on the 29th of February crowded every available spot in the galleries. ”But it was on the floor itself,” wrote Stanton to the _Tribune_, ”that the most interesting spectacle presented itself. Every senator seemed to be in his seat. Hunter, Davis, Toombs, Mason, Slidell, Hammond, Clingman, Brown, and Benjamin paid closest attention to the speaker. Crittenden listened to every word. Douglas affected to be self-possessed; but his nervousness of mien gave token that the truths now uttered awakened memories of the Lecompton contest, when he, Seward, and Crittenden, the famous triumvirate, led the allies in their attack upon the Administration. The members of the House streamed over to the north wing of the Capitol almost in a body, leaving Reagan of Texas to discourse to empty benches, while Seward held his levee in the Senate.”[513]
[Footnote 513: New York _Tribune_, March 1, 1860.]
Seward lacked the tones, the kindly eye, and the mirth-provoking look of Lincoln. His voice was husky, his manner didactic, and his physique unimposing, but he had the gift of expression, and the ability to formulate his opinions and marshal his facts in lucid sentences that harmonised with Northern sentiments and became at once the creed and rallying cry of his party; and, on this occasion, he held the Senate spellbound for two hours, the applause at one time becoming so long continued that the presiding officer threatened to clear the galleries. He was always calm and temperate. But it seemed now to be his desire, in language more subdued, perhaps, than he had ever used before, to allay the fears of what would happen should the Republican party succeed in electing a President; and, without the sacrifice of any principle, he endeavoured to outline the views of Republicans and the spirit that animated himself. There was nothing new in his speech.
He avoided the higher law and irrepressible conflict doctrines, and omitted his former declarations that slavery ”can and must be abolished, and you and I can and must do it.” In like manner he failed to demand, as formerly, that the Supreme Court ”recede from its spurious judgment” in the Dred Scott case. But he reviewed with the same logic that had characterised his utterances for twenty years, the relation of the Const.i.tution to slavery; the influence of slavery upon both parties; the history of the Kansas controversy; and the manifest advantages of the Union, dwelling at length and with much originality upon the firm hold it had upon the people, and the certainty that it would survive the rudest shocks of faction. Of the Harper's Ferry affair, Seward spoke with more sympathy than Lincoln. ”While generous and charitable natures will probably concede that John Brown acted on earnest, though fatally erroneous convictions,” he said, ”yet all good citizens will nevertheless agree that this attempt to execute an unlawful purpose in Virginia by invasion, involving servile war, was an act of sedition and treason, and criminal in just the extent that it affected the public peace and was destructive of human happiness and life.”
It has been noted with increasing admiration that Lincoln and Seward, without consultation and in the presence of a great impending crisis, paralleled one another's views so closely. Each embodied the convictions and aspirations of his party. The spirit of an unsectarian patriotism that characterised Seward's speech proved highly satisfactory to the great ma.s.s of Republicans. The New York _Times_ rejoiced that its tone indicated ”a desire to allay and remove unfounded prejudice from the public mind,” and p.r.o.nounced ”the whole tenor of it in direct contradiction to the sentiments which have been imputed to him on the strength of declarations which he has. .h.i.therto made.”[514] Samuel Bowles of the Springfield _Republican_ wrote Thurlow Weed that the state delegation--so ”very marked” is the reaction in Seward's favour--would ”be so strong for him as to be against anybody else,” and that ”I hear of ultra old Whigs in Boston who say they are ready to take him up on his recent speech.”[515]
Charles A. Dana, then managing editor of the _Tribune_, declared that ”Seward stock is rising,” and Salmon P. Chase admitted that ”there seems to be at present a considerable set toward Seward.” Nathaniel P.
Banks, who was himself spoken of as a candidate, thought Seward's prospects greatly enhanced.
[Footnote 514: New York _Times_, March 2, 1860.]
[Footnote 515: Thurlow Weed Barnes, _Life of Thurlow Weed_, Vol. 2, p.
260.]
But a growing and influential body of men in the Republican party severely criticised the speech because it lacked the moral earnestness of the ”higher law” spirit. To them it seemed as if Seward had made a bid for the Presidency, and that the irrepressible conflict of 1858 was suddenly transformed into the condition of a mild and patient lover who is determined not to quarrel. ”Differences of opinion, even on the subject of slavery,” he said, ”are with us political, not social or personal differences. There is not one disunionist or disloyalist among us all. We are altogether unconscious of any process of dissolution going on among us or around us. We have never been more patient, and never loved the representatives of other sections more than now. We bear the same testimony for the people around us here. We bear the same testimony for all the districts and States we represent.”
This did not sound like the terrible ”irrepressible conflict” pictured at Rochester. Wendell Phillips' famous epigram that ”Seward makes a speech in Was.h.i.+ngton on the tactics of the Republican party, but phrases it to suit Wall street,”[516] voiced the sentiment of his critics. Garrison was not less severe. ”The temptation which proved too powerful for Webster,” he wrote, ”is seducing Seward to take the same downward course.”[517] Greeley did not vigorously combat this idea. ”Governor Seward,” he said, ”has so long been stigmatised as a radical that those who now first study his inculcations carefully will be astonished to find him so eminently pacific and conservative.
<script>